worldwide

Bad news: the “copyright notice” you’ve been reading (and sharing, ugh) is completely bogus and a waste of everyone’s time. Facebook owns the photos, videos, and statuses you upload, and that’s not going to change just because you say so.

But here’s something you can do that might actually make a difference.

When you signed up for Facebook, you agreed to Facebook’s Terms of Service (ToS). These are the rules you agree to play by so long as you use Facebook, period. They’re Facebook’s rules. Odds are you didn’t bother reading the ToS before you signed up, because Facebook was new and exciting and who ever reads that stuff anyway? No one does.

Half a decade or so later, we’re still bound by those rules—and that means that, despite all the hoaxes floating around today that might tell you otherwise, Facebook owns the pictures and videos you share. And you can’t opt out, ever, because you agreed to this:

(I’ll bold the important parts)

Your Content and Information

You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings. In addition:

For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.

When you delete IP content, it is deleted in a manner similar to emptying the recycle bin on a computer. However, you understand that removed content may persist in backup copies for a reasonable period of time (but will not be available to others).

In short: if you upload a photo, Facebook is 100%, completely allowed to use it (or sell it) until you delete that photo or delete your account. This isn’t to say that it does any of this stuff—and in fact Facebook is adamant that it does not—just reserving the right to at some point in the future.

But those rules aren’t written in stone. Instead of posting pointless copyright notices, to your timeline, try something that might actually get something done. Say you don’t want the photos you take of your private life to be potentially sold by a company with shareholders whose interests aren’t yours. Say you object specifically to the wording of Section 2.1 of the Facebook ToS:

The photos, videos, thoughts, and all other intellectual property I create should remain mine unless I tell Facebook they can own it. Facebook should remove section 2.1 from its Terms of Service, terminating its “transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post.” Short of this, I should be allowed to opt-out of this agreement with Facebook.

It’s a longshot, but at the very least you’ll be sharing a sentiment that’s not pure misinformation and naïveté. Sharing fake copyright BS is an annoyance. Sharing a sincere grievance isn’t. But remember: until anything changes, Facebook will own the text of your grievance in full.

If you thought Amazon’s prices seemed too good to be true, well, it turns out they might be—for Amazon, at least. The company managed to turn $13.8 billion of revenue into a $274 million loss this past quarter. And while a big chunk of that was due to losses at LivingSocial and foreign-exchange rates, all is clearly not well on Mount Bezos.

Amazon remained silent on just how many Kindle devices it has sold, but reiterated that it doesn’t make any money off of the ones that it has. Said CEO and probably Superman villain Jeff Bezos:

“Our approach is to work hard to charge less. Sell devices near breakeven and you can pack a lot of sophisticated hardware into a very low price point… And our approach is working—the $199 Kindle Fire HD is the #1 bestselling product across Amazon worldwide. Incredibly, this is true even as measured by unit sales.”

The approach may be working in terms of moving units, but that clearly has been translating into less and less profit. But hey, that just means you’re getting every bit the bargain you thought you were.

The biggest killer appears to be that LivingSocial investment; while Amazon doesn’t own the daily deals company outright, it has a major stake in its flailing business. One that amounted to a $169 million hit against its bottom line these last three months alone.

Amazon’s going to be holding a call at 5PM EDT to discuss what happened in more detail; we’ll be updating as necessary. For now, though, clearly Amazon looks like a ship that needs righting. Or maybe it just needs to throw off some of that LivingSocial ballast. [Businesswire]

Typically, when a product hits the market, you’d hope details like nitty-gritty licensing and IP would have all been worked out prior to going on sale. Of course, things in the real world are never that simple. Take for example, OnLive and Microsoft, which according the latter, says OnLive Desktop isn’t exactly in the clear when it comes to its remote Windows 7 slinging abilities. Clarified on Microsoft’s Volume Licensing blog, Joe Matz, VP of worldwide licensing, said the company is “actively engaged with OnLive” in the hopes of “bringing them into a properly licensed scenario.” When asked, an OnLive representative responded with: “We have never commented on any licensing agreements.” Sounds like it’ll all get resolved soon, but in the meantime do your homework kids — lawyers are expensive.

That means your favorite Bloomberg News reporters and Bloomberg TV anchors will take home a lower paycheck, according to the report.

If you’re not already familiar with the Bloomberg terminal, it’s basically a computer that’s targeted toward financial professionals so they can message other users, obtain real-time market data, news and stock quotes among many other functions.

They’re really awesome.

According to the Post, there are currently 310,000 terminals that are being used worldwide. However, the company only added 13,672 in 2011, which was short of its internal sales goal of 15,000.

So if they sold 1,328 more they wouldn’t be having this lower payout problem. Of course, it’s not exactly the best environment out there on Wall Street.

On a side note, revenue at Bloomberg climbed $720 million, or 10.5%, to $7.59 billion, the Post reported.

Luxury watches are not just functional wristwear–they’re works of art with hundreds of years of technology packed inside.

Consumers’ tastes and shopping preferences for watches are evolving around the globe.

Market research company Digital Luxury Group has just released its annual report on the worldwide market for high-end watches, looking at 15 of the world’s biggest haute timepiece brands ahead of Baselworld, the upcoming international watch and jewelry show in Switzerland.

The report is based on more than a billion consumer searches for luxury watches on search engines including Google, Bing and Baidu.

For the first time in 2011, demand for luxury watches was higher in the US than in China, based on internet search market share.

Within China, more than half of demand for luxury timepieces comes from first- and second-tier coastal cities with high-end shopping streets, like Beijing and Shanghai.

Heritage brands like Patek Philippe and Vacheron Constantin are more popular with traditional clients from Beijing, while IWC attracts a younger, trendier, urban audience.

Apple remains conspicuous by its absence (again) at this year’s CES, but preliminary shipment estimates for PCs sold in Q4 2011 show that the company appears to be bucking the generally declining trend. Worldwide shipments dropped 1.4 percent compared to the same period last year, with the US seeing a 5.9 percent decline. The global drop includes an estimated 16.2 percent decrease from HP while Acer battled an 18.4 percent loss in shipments. Staving off any decline, both Lenovo (23 percent) and Asus (20.5 percent) managed an increase. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mac shipments — including both desktop and notebook models — saw a 20.7 percent increase since Q4 2010. Who needs booth babes?

There are lots of third-party guesstimates floating around about Google+ traffic. Are users losing interest like search trends seem to show? Has the service grown to 150 million active users like this research firm thinks? I’ve gotten new numbers from comScore, which is arguably the best third-party measurement firm for web traffic in the world.

It shows that Google+ grew from 65 million unique visitors in October to nearly 67 million in November. This is purely based on traffic to the plus.google.com subdomain, comScore’s Andrew Lipsman tells me today. So it doesn’t include the many Google+ feature injections that the search company has administered to its other properties over the last months. Some people have suggested that Google+ is as barren as a desert — this is at least an oasis.

Here’s how the service stacked up against competitors last month.

The depressing significance for those people out there wishing for Google+ to either die off or kill their rivals is that neither appears to be happening. Just some slow and steady growth, which is overall good for Google considering the vast resources and focus that it’s bringing to bear on the effort. Ultimately, Google+ doesn’t have to dominate now, it just needs to keep growing and getting better over the coming years in order to be a real alternative to Facebook and everyone else.

And now, the usual data caveat: Obviously comScore, like any other third-party, doesn’t have the same access to data as Google itself, so don’t assume these numbers are 100% right. But still they’re worth paying attention to, since Google doesn’t share much about how it’s doing. The last time the company released anything, it said it had 40 million registered users during its earnings call in October. That’s not directly comparable to this, but could indicate that there’s been more significant growth over the fall. Also, for more on worldwide social networking trends, check out our coverage of comScore’s 2011 social report from yesterday.

While the Android tablets continue to roll in, Apple can still lay claim to the lion’s share of the tablet market according to IDC’s latest report. Its research suggests that the iPad holds onto 61.5 percent of the worldwide market share, down from 63.3 percent last quarter. Android devices in total also saw a slight contraction, down from 33.2 percent to 32.4 percent. This is partly explained by the HP TouchPad’s final hurrah, which rocketed the ill-fated webOS tablet up to third place with a 5 percent of share of tablet sales and an estimated 903,354 devices sold. Samsung maintained its Honeycomb tablet crown, nabbing 5.6 percent of all tablet sales. The Korean manufacturer was closely tailed by Barnes and Noble’s Nook Color with 4.5 percent and Asus, arriving at fifth place with a four percent share. Tablets in total sold less than the analysts had predicted, although growth has still exploded 264 percent compared to this time last year. Meanwhile, E-readers outperformed estimates, with 6.5 million E-readers sold in the third quarter, up 165.9 percent from last year. IDC expects some disruptive new tablets will spice up the fourth quarter results and you can take a look at its findings and predictions at the full press release below.

Get ready to rumble, the latest Gartner and IDC smartphone numbers are out to give us a pretty good idea of how things shape up globally. Remember, IDC measures vendor shipments while Gartner measures actual handset sales to end users. So what does the data tell us? Well, to start with, in terms of smartphone devices, Gartner claims a 48.7% increase in smartphone sales of 54.3 million units in Q1 2010 compared to Q1 2009 — IDC pegs growth at 56.7% on 54.7 million units for the same period. Both estimates easily outpace the 17% or 21.7% growth in worldwide units of mobile phones moved according to Gartner and IDC, respectively.

IDC’s list of top 5 smartphone device makers (pictured above) has Nokia at the number one spot repeating its 39.3% share as it did in Q1 of 2009 while RIM is down slightly from 20.9% in 2009 to a 19.4% market share in 2010. Apple (up from 10.9% to 16.1%) more than doubled its device shipments in the last year as HTC (up from 4.3% to 4.8%) and Motorola (up from 3.4% to 4.2%) all managed to increase their shares on higher volumes.

Regarding smartphone OS market share, Android’s global numbers echo its success in the US jumping from a 1.6% market share to 9.6% in just one year. Gartner claims that sales of Android-based phones increased 707% year-on-year to displace Windows Mobile in the top 5 for the first time. Apple’s iPhone OS also saw growth from 10.5% in 1Q09 to 15.4% in 1Q10 as both RIM (down from 20.1% to 19.4%) and Symbian (down from 48.8% to 44.3%) dropped. See the OS numbers broken down into a no-nonsense table after the break.

Digital Consigliere

Dr. Augustine Fou is Digital Consigliere to marketing executives, advising them on digital strategy and Unified Marketing(tm). Dr Fou has over 17 years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience, which enables him to provide objective, in-depth assessments of their current marketing programs and recommendations for improving business impact and ROI using digital insights.